Currently, in France, the ticketing of vehicles on public thoroughfares by a police officer or traffic warden is carried out by manually filling in the date, time and parking location, as well as vehicle-related information such as the license number, make, etc. Once completed, the ticket is placed under the vehicle's windshield wiper. When in possession of this document, the owner of the ticketed vehicle pays the fine by buying a fine stamp in a tobacconist's shop. The stamp is then pasted on the ticket and sent to the Public Treasury.
Actually, this system presents several disadvantages. Specifically, the police officer who issued the ticket is faced with a tedious and time-consuming task as he must fill in, by hand and in duplicate, all of the information on the ticket and in the ticket book. This takes a considerable amount of time and is not particularly efficient. Furthermore, the administrative processing of the tickets is very difficult to manage.
Another major disadvantage stems from the fact that the ticket is placed under the vehicle's windshield wiper. If it rains once the ticket is placed on the vehicle's windshield, it becomes wet or even soaked, difficult to handle and often altered, making it unusable for the payment operation. In addition, as the tickets are simply placed under the windshield wiper, they are sometimes removed as a joke or removed by dishonest motorists who place the ticket under the windshield wiper of their own vehicle in an attempt to avoid having a police officer place a ticket on it thinking that the vehicle has already been ticketed. In such cases, the ticketed motorist is not aware that he/she received a ticket and will thus have to pay a higher fine when claimed at a later date, thereby increasing the already high volume of disputed tickets.
An offence ticket processing system described in patent application FR-A-2.665.779 enables a certain number of the above-mentioned disadvantages to be solved. This system consists of a portable self-contained terminal featuring an alphanumeric keyboard, a screen and a printer capable of printing a barcode on the traffic ticket entered by the police officer using the keyboard. A microcomputer in the police station is connected to the portable terminals via a connecting cable for the purpose of collecting and processing the information gathered by the police officer. A payment terminal, also located in the police station, features a ticket reader enabling the vehicle owner to pay his/her fine.
Unfortunately, insofar as the system described in document FR-A-2.665.779 still uses tickets made of paper or other alterable material, the disadvantage of having the ticket ruined by rain still exists, particularly as the alteration of one or more bars of the barcode is all that would be necessary to make it unusable in case of rain.
In the same manner, this type of ticket can still be easily removed from the ticketed vehicle and placed on another vehicle. Another disadvantage inherent to this type of system is due to the use of a printer which is either bulky and heavy or miniaturized and thus not very reliable. In all cases, the printer is liable to breakdown as it operates in an environment subjected to inclement weather. Finally, the barcodes can be easily falsified by an offender who wants to add or remove bars, thus making way to unacceptable forging possibilities in this sensitive application field, the implementation of which must be based on total security and reliability.